WOMEN’S REPRESENTATION IN SOUTH INDIAN CINEMA: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF FILM AND GENDER STUDIES (2010–2025)

The article summarizes all the published research articles, as well as theses that discuss how women are portrayed in South Indian (mainly Tamil) films. The article presents this work over a period from 2010 to 2025. The author uses film analysis, feminist theory and cultural studies to summarize the body of work and discusses dominant themes, ideological structures and the changes in the portrayal of women in film. The author details the changes in film regarding women's portrayals of sadness, sacrifice and suffering to women's portrayals of independence, agency and radical self-expression. In total, the author found between 40 and 50 peer-reviewed journal articles through an organised search through Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar which met the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The findings indicate a gradual change towards depicting women as having power over their subjectivity, but this shift has occurred at a very uneven rate due to socio-political changes, changes in feminist theory and the emergence of the Gen-Z audience. Despite these advances, the evidence continues to indicate that patriarchal forms of control, symbolic barriers and moral restrictions upon women's agency continue to exist in films. This review creates a comprehensive framework for studying women's portrayals in South Indian cinema and highlights the gaps within current research for future researchers to focus on.